A Whale of an Index

Two-time U.S. Women’s Champion Jennifer Shahade blogged about how she began “reading” my book King’s Gambit by consulting the index for all mentions of Shahade.

I love indexes. Today I found my old Thomas calculus book from high school, and, just as I remembered, there was a little hijinks in the index. It says, “Whales, p. 188.” But turn to page 188 and you’ll find no mention of whales; there are two graphs on the page, though, that are vaguely whale-shaped.

On reading this posting, I also fondly remembered (or thought I remembered) something from an old math book. I found Rotman’s “Theory of Groups” on my shelf, opened to the index, and — yes, it was there: Sandwiched between p-group and Polya, Rotman has an entry that reads